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This Week in Drupal Core: October 9, 2013

What's new in Drupal 8?

Goodbye, legacy BC routing support!

This week's most exciting news: After five months of work, we've removed the legacy BC support from the routing system. This means that module developers testing Drupal 8's APIs will quickly discover the need to upgrade their hook_menu() page callbacks to route declarations and page controllers, and we can surface gaps in the new system. Next steps: remove the legacy menu router entirely and fix core's routing API documentation to clean up stale, inaccurate information and provide clearer explanations of the new system.

Core momentum

In the three months of Drupal 8's API completion phase following the July 1 API freeze deadline, core contributors have shifted focus to finishing Drupal 8's APIs and resolving release-blocking issues. Between July 1 and September 30, we fixed 99 critical issues, compared to only 66 fixed between April 1 and June 30. The best part? This week, for the first time in a long time, we've steadily reduced the number of open critical issues in Drupal 8. (For a closer look at our momentum on critical issues, see: When it's ready™.)

Meanwhile, core contributors continue to work through the results of DrupalCon Prague sprints. The RTBC queue is back under two pages, thanks to tireless work by Drupal 8's core maintainers, who committed almost twice as many patches this week as in preceding weeks.

Contributors stepping up as core component maintainers

Core's MAINTAINERS.txt contains a listing of contributors who've committed to leading the charge in a certain area of Drupal core. These folks play an important role in managing Drupal 8 toward release. (See the Component maintainers tag for issues focused on helping fill out this team for Drupal 8. Want to help? Just start working in your chosen component's queue, and then take a look at the component maintainer handbook page and xjm's blog post for more information on what goes into being a component maintainer.)

Issue #2099977 by andypost: Add andypost as a component maintainer for comment.module.

Issue #2103231 by Mark Carver: Add Mark Carver to the list of theme system maintainers in MAINTAINERS.txt.

Progress towards removing the legacy variable system

One of the big outstanding tasks for the Configuration Management Initiative is completing the conversion of legacy variables in core to the new Drupal 8 APIs. These conversions are in their home stretch, with just 5% of the conversions left to go. Four conversions landed this week:

User experience (UX) improvements

Drupal 8 makes great strides in improving the user experience for administrators, site builders, content authors, and end users. Here's a sampling of some of the small fixes that are adding up to a big UX boost:

Drupal 8 in "Real Life"

October 24-27: BADCamp 2013 is just two weeks away! The four-day event includes lots of great Drupal 8 content for site builders, module authors, and core contributors, plus a full-day core summit on October 27. Also don't miss the extended sprints which run from October 21 all the way through to October 29. The teams for Views, Configuration, Multilingual, Web Services, Documentation, Usability, Media, and Twig all need your help to make Drupal 8 awesome! Sign up now.

Other events coming up in the next couple of weeks that have a decent amount of content dedicated to Drupal 8 include:

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